Month: July 2022

Welcome Home to Hanfordville!

July 31, 2022 / Kendra

If your current living situation isn’t what you wish it was, it’s so easy to feel as though you’re the only one searching for your dream home. This isn’t true of course. But our emotions don’t usually follow logical patterns of thought. Obviously you’re not the only one looking for your dream house because if you were, it wouldn’t be a big deal to find it. And if you’ve been putting in offers on potential homes and haven’t had your offer chosen, there’s a good chance you’re not alone. There are probably a dozen other potential home buyers who were disappointed that day too. What if there were 214 potentially disappointed home buyers? What if you were one of 215 families on a waiting list for housing here in Los Alamos? In 1946 that’s exactly how long the waiting list at the Los Alamos housing office was!

We wait in line for lots of things in life. Why not a house?

1946 was the year he MED (Manhattan Engineer District) contracted to build the Western Area neighborhood. It was supposed to be the ultimate answer to the housing crisis in Los Alamos. Except that the potential occupants had more than a few gripes about construction that they wanted addressed. By the time a task force from Washington DC was called out, the whole thing took a lot longer than anyone anticipated. You can read about more about that here. In the meantime, the MED started to get a bit anxious about that waiting list for housing. Losing the Laboratory workforce due to housing issues might impact the work. And as anyone who has been around Los Alamos knows, nothing gets LANL moving more than the possibility of inconvenience to the work!

Early housing wasn’t always pretty and didn’t necessarily include indoor plumbing.

There were several stopgap housing solutions. I’ve been blogging about these temporary neighborhoods for the last few weeks now. You can go back and read about “Morganville“, “McKeeville“, and the “Denver Metals” by following these links. There’s another stopgap housing neighborhood I touched on briefly, but these little beauties deserve a little more explaining. “Hanfordville”, as the Army newspaper the Daily Bulletin dubbed it, was made up of 107 prefab “homes” that arrived in Los Alamos after being moved from Hanford, Washington.

The blocky one and two bedroom units had been assembled in 1943 to house construction crews working at the MED’s plutonium facility. The workers were no longer needed as the Hanford Reactors were completed. The construction camp at Hanford was deconstructed in 1946-47. You might say that the MED needed to do something with the little camp houses so they figured they might as well bring them to Los Alamos. Another common name for the Hanford Houses back in 1946 were the Pasco Houses. Pasco was another town in Washington State where constructions crews for the reactor site were housed. If you haven’t ever looked into the link between Hanford, Washington and Los Alamos, you should. Did you know they have their own Manhattan Project Museum?

With diesel fuel currently rising to nearly six dollars a gallon, it would be difficult to decide whether fuel costs or the price of construction materials would determine the practicality of such a solution these days. But back in 1946 the MED decided it wasn’t such a big deal to commission 214 tractor trailers with flatbeds to bring 107 prefab houses nearly 1300 miles to be reassembled. Each Hanford house had to be broken into two parts for transport. It must’ve been a crazy sight!

Over the years Los Alamos has seen some amazing things go up and down the narrow twisting road up from the canyon floor to the top of the mesa. Remember though, when early contractors were tasked with building the Laboratory facilities back in the early forties, their first chore was to somehow build a road to haul all of their construction crews and supplies up the hill.

Before that, in the days of the Ranch School, there were several other options for supply roads. Historical sites in Bayo Canyon and out on Kwage Mesa show evidence of wagon trails from early homesteaders on the Pajarito Plateau. Seen in this light, the MED must have been fairly desperate for quick housing solutions to consider this an acceptable stopgap solution.

Regardless of the cost, the MED moved 107 Hanford houses to Los Alamos in 1946. A good number of the homes were assembled in the vicinity of Kiva and Iris Streets. Today this is in the general vicinity of the Iris Street Condos. The others were placed along 10th Street, Canyon and Rim Roads. “Hanfordville” was right next to “McKeeville”, which was next to “Morganville”. A likely question when you made a new acquaintance in Los Alamos in those days was “Where do you live?”. Your answer would probably be met with either envy or commiseration. After all, housing woes in Los Alamos are what made us all equal back then and even now.

Whether your Hanford House had a one bedroom or a two bedroom floorplan, you were guaranteed the same basics. You got a combination living room and kitchen. There was even a swing curtain you could put between the two in order to keep “cooking odors” out of the living room. The bathroom had a shower, a sink, and a toilet. And your bedroom or bedroom(s) were tucked into the end of the unit with barely enough space for a double bed and a dresser.

Residents were strangely positive about a few amenities we would almost certainly take for granted these days. An oil stove in the family room heated the entire living space and each unit had a three burner electric stove and a “modern” electric refrigerator. Considering the rationing of electricity in Los Alamos during the war years, that electric stove was living large in those days. Remember that prior to this, electric hot plates had to be purchased on the black market. Such different times!

The Hanford Homes weren’t super popular. In fact the quote was “they’re considered solid shelter”, which is rather frightening if you think about it. Perhaps keeping people’s expectations low means they are more satisfied with less. Another quote from an interview between writer Craig Martin and former Hanford resident Hal Kerr was that “the only problem was that when a driving rain came from the west, the place leaked like a sieve.”. Perhaps not a huge deal in all seasons, but considering the terrific monsoon rains we’ve been getting in the last few weeks, a dry roof over your head can become really important at times.

The Hanford Homes were never meant to be permanent. Thankfully we’re not seeing them on the current MLS and you’re not likely to be shopping for modern appliances that might possibly be compatible with your Hanford. They’re a part of our past and perhaps a good reminder that no matter how crazy we think the real estate market is here in in Los Alamos, it’s not nearly as nuts as it back when it all started. In fact, if you’re ready to talk modern real estate in Los Alamos, give me a call! I’m your hometown real estate broker. I’d love to chat about your home in Los Alamos.

Trailer Living in Los Alamos

July 25, 2022 / Kendra

There is one thing that has always been and will likely always be true about housing in Los Alamos. It’s creative. Whether you live in group housing, a condo, an apartment, a single family home on Barranca Mesa, a five acre plot of land in Pajarito Acres, a mobile home, or even an Air BnB. You’ll probably agree that housing options in Los Alamos are sometimes unusual, but always creative!

There are currently three mobile home parks in Los Alamos. La Mesa and Tsikumu Village are up on North Mesa and of course Elk Ridge (formerly Royal Crest) is on East Jemez Rd at the top of what we locals often refer to as the “Truck Route”. Each mobile home park offers its own unique array of amenities.

Homeowners in Tsikumu Village own not only their manufactured home, but the lot it sits on. Some of these homes have incredible views from the canyon’s edge. La Mesa Trailer Park has a more traditional arrangement with manufactured homes owned by the homeowner and lots owned by a landlord. The park itself has a great location on North Mesa close to a dog park, playgrounds, athletic fields, and the Middle School. Elk Ridge offers a little more flexibility in the sort of “trailer home” an occupant wants to put on their rented lot. If you’ve got a travel trailer of any sort, you’re welcome to set up for “permanent” use at Elk Ridge.

It might be difficult to imagine choosing to live in your fifth wheel or camp trailer for months on end while working at LANL. However, if you look back at the beginning of Los Alamos housing history, you’ll find that Laboratory employees have been doing this since the very beginning. Not only that, but the sort of camping trailers available on the market in the 1940s weren’t going to come with a full kitchen, shower, satellite television, and perhaps even a gas fireplace. They were pretty basic back then. And a good number of them were manufactured by their owners.

Back in the early to mid 1940s, the Los Alamos site had already far exceeded its original call for “sufficient housing for a dozen scientists”. It didn’t take long for even the most skilled workers to be given a bed in 23 expandable trailers and 47 standard trailers. Even though the term “expandable trailer” calls to mind any number of modern camp trailers, these were most definitely not modern. By the time the sides had been folded away from the middle, the living room wound up being about 13×6 feet. If you can’t imagine what sort of space that is, think a box stall for livestock in a barn. Thank goodness they weren’t trying to fit their big screen television inside!

The trailers brought in to serve for temporary housing weren’t going to win any esthetic design contests.

Of course, if came to the Manhattan Engineer District when the trailer park was already full, you might have been assigned a hutment. Quonset Hutments were originally designed for war in the Pacific theater. Thanks to this fact, Los Alamos residents dubbed the huts the Pacific Hutments. Shaped a bit like an airplane hangar, these were used as duplexes with one front door on either end of the tube.

Last but not least, we come full circle to the folks who took the option to drive their own campers or “caravans” up to Los Alamos in order to take up residence in the trailer park. In his book about Los Alamos housing, Craig Martin estimates there were over 250 privately owned trailers parked in town to provide housing for their owners. If you’ve ever looked at a RV from the 1940s, they weren’t going to provide you with the creature comforts we expect from such a vehicle today. In fact, these didn’t even have any kind of indoor plumbing.

These days it isn’t uncommon for people to debate what to do with the MariMac Plaza or the old Hilltop House hotel. There’s been a lot of talk about how to best present Los Alamos to the public when newcomers first drive into town. Now, imagine a time before tourism. The first thing people saw when they approached the general vicinity of our new roundabout was a maze of over three hundred expandable, standard, and camper trailers. It’s rather amazing anyone stuck around!

Quonset Huts in the Pacific were white. Here in Los Alamos they were Army Green!

That’s right, folks. The location of Los Alamos’s very first “trailer park” is the lot occupied by the MariMac Plaza and the Hilltop House hotel. Just across Central Avenue from this “trailer park”, the Pacific Hutments crouched in rows of round topped buildings. Keep in mind that none of these dwellings had indoor plumbing. This meant that there were latrine and shower trailers parked in between the rows of trailers and hutments.

While Los Alamos wasn’t exactly putting its best foot forward back then, people were here for the mission and not the housing. Maybe, like almost all of us at one time, newcomers were so transfixed by the incredible views that they simply didn’t care how creative their housing was. They just wanted to be here in this amazing city on the hill. If you’d like to join the community of Los Alamos, give me a call! I’d love to talk Real Estate with you!

The First Single Family House in Los Alamos

July 17, 2022 / Kendra

Being in the Real Estate business, I hear so many things from buyers and sellers on what they feel makes a house a home. If you were to change up the geographical location, some folks might talk about a condo on a lake. Perhaps a penthouse apartment overlooking Central Park in New York City. Maybe they want a tiny apartment in some far flung location like Livorno, Italy where buildings are literally perched on a cliff overlooking the ocean.

Perhaps one of the most popular and longest lasting concepts of idyllic American life is the proverbial three bedroom, two bathroom house with a white picket fence, two children, two cars, and maybe a dog and a cat. Most of us grew up with this concept somewhere in our minds even though it’s certainly not the sort of place the cast of Sesame Street ever called home.

It shouldn’t be surprising then that one of the first and most often verbalized wishes of early Los Alamos residents was a desire for single family housing.

What many of us don’t realize is that the Ranch School Master Houses with their quaint log cabin looks and claw foot bathtubs weren’t used as single family housing during the war. Even Hans Bethe was sharing with physicist Edwin McMillan. The Arts & Crafts Cottage hosted Lt Col Whitney Ashbridge, Capt Gerald Tyler, A.L. Hughes, and Enrico Ferme at various times and sometimes more or less at once! These gentlemen occasionally had wives with them, but a good number of them were by themselves and sharing quarters while they worked sunup to sundown on the project of a lifetime.

The first single family homes in Los Alamos weren’t even intentionally created to satisfy the wishes of the residents. The project happened because of a sharp increase in personnel needed for the design of a plutonium implosion bomb in 1944. In July of that year, the Robert McKee Construction Company was contracted to bring in 100 prefabricated homes. The most readily available “houses” happened to be flat roofed units that resembled a box. Each building included small rooms in a basic layout that sat on blocks and weren’t even particularly airtight.

“McKeeville”, as it was soon called, was situated on seven city blocks that seemed to spring up overnight with absolutely no thought given to the landscape. Existing pinon and juniper trees were bulldozed to speed up construction. The location was essentially between Central Avenue and Canyon Road. Those city blocks no longer exist, but they would have been crammed into the area of present day Iris and Myrtle Streets. The houses were contracted in July 1944. By October of the same year they were ready and by Christmas they were full.

Once again, the residents of Los Alamos thought rather wistfully of the Sundt Apartments. When the Sundts had been built, the contractor had allowed the streets to flow with the natural landscape. Trees had been preserved. The neighborhoods seemed less “military” in looks and the buildings were sturdy and reliable.

In striking contrast, the McKee houses had cracks and crevices that did nothing to keep the dirt out. During the spring winds, furniture and appliances were coated with dust. Add the soot coming from the oil furnaces to the atmosphere in McKeeville and the entire neighborhood had a dingy, dirty feel to it. In short, they were a slight improvement on “Morganville“, but were most definitely not the sort of home you’d go out and purchase to live in on purpose.

The only thing residents agreed on was the the McKeeville homes were better than those in Morganville.

Residents of McKeeville had a variety of complaints about the latest cheap housing brought in to ease the overcrowding in Los Alamos. Bedrooms were so small that a double bed took up the entirety of the floor space. The houses were so similar and the streets so uniform, that it was nearly impossible to tell one dwelling from another. Remember that streets were not labeled back in those days. One resident commented that she felt fortunate the McKee house she shared with her husband was located next to the laundry unit. She reported using the laundry building to help her find her way home each day.

On the upside of the whole situation was Robert McKee’s insistence that inexpensive maple furniture be included in each McKee house. While these furnishings were still considered substandard compared to what most people had in their homes, it was apparently an upgrade from what was called GI furniture used in Morganville and the other housing in Los Alamos.

Pause for a moment or two and chuckle about that. Have you tried to shop for real maple furniture these days? Evidently residents of McKeeville in 1945 would not have been impressed by the bargains we find at IKEA. I have to wonder to myself if this GI furniture might not be similar to the prefab things we tend to pick up at Walmart or Target. Oh, the irony!

As always, I want to tip my hat to Craig Martin’s field guide to housing in Los Alamos. I encourage you to purchase a copy from the Los Alamos Historical Society for yourself. If you have any interest in Los Alamos housing, this book is a wealth of information. Keep checking back in with my blog as we continue our tour through Los Alamos housing past, present, and even future! And when you’re ready to start hunting for your own Los Alamos housing, give me a call! I’d love to chat Los Alamos Real Estate with you.

A Word About Los Alamos & Rent

July 10, 2022 / Kendra

There is not a doubt in anyone’s mind that the topic of rents, mortgage payments, and how much each individual is paying for one or the other is a worldwide issue. Before the recent fluctuations in interest rates, the historically low cost of borrowing money to purchase a home made buying more financially attractive than renting. Whether you pay rent here in Los Alamos or not, there are a few things to keep in mind. Some of these facts might make you feel a lot better about your current housing situation in Los Alamos.

How Important Are YOU?

While most of us are willing to acknowledge that there is something of a hierarchy attached to the importance of jobs, modern minds have begun to understand that the proverbial “rocket scientist” is really just as important in the grand scheme of things as “schoolteacher”, “doctor”, “lawyer”, and (for a lot of us lately) “fast food worker”. If nothing else, our experiences through the pandemic of not being able to go into a store, sit in a restaurant, or receive a package or mail because there was quite literally nobody to deliver it, have changed our values in a lasting way.

In the early 1940’s when Los Alamos was still a military installation doing top-secret work for the war effort, housing was assigned much in the same way it was assigned at any military installation. But instead of being assigned by rank, it was assigned based upon how important YOUR job was to the mission.

Of course, top staff members, prominent scientists, and other important persons were immediately assigned to Bathtub Row. The Ranch School Master Houses had indoor plumbing, decent kitchen facilities, were of a good size, and had the fabled bathtub. If you didn’t rate a Master House, you had very limited options when it came to your quarters.

The “Hans Bethe House”, named for one of its more historic occupants

Newcomers would be sent to the housing office, which was located in an old converted garage left from the ranch school days. They would fill out a form to establish their job or function on the Army post, and their family size. They would then be given a housing assignment and informed of what their rent would be each month.

A married couple rated one bedroom. Married with a child got a you a second bedroom. More than one child and you might get a three bedroom if there was one available. It was pretty common for Los Alamos residents to joke that nobody had better have more than three children at the most, and more than two kids was pushing it. Keep in mind that most of the three bedroom units available at that time were much smaller than the Group housing we are familiar with today. Ever considered living in your travel trailer with your kids for an extended period of time? Oh, and don’t forget that all of those modern conveniences available in your travel trailer wouldn’t have been a thing at all. Families didn’t even have their own furniture.

It might look fun, but how about doing it year round?

What Would YOU Pay to Live in a Shoebox?

The topic of Rents in Los Alamos really didn’t become a subject of discussion until 1944 when an influx of new workers caused the Army to hurriedly contract Morgan and Sons to “build” some 28 duplexes on an already flat and treeless section of land east of Bathtub Row. These pre fab duplexes would have essentially been the first housing in the vicinity of what is now Sage Loop.

Welcome home to “Morganville”. Doesn’t everyone want a coal bin in front to add to the curb appeal?

To call the housing project slapdash would probably be generous. There were eight one bedroom units, fifteen two bedroom units and five three bedroom units. The area was dubbed “Morganville” for the construction contractor. Buildings were boring and essentially identical and the streets were rigidly uniform. One resident was heard to call the houses “Little Horrors”. After all, the Army was desperately trying to make their budget stretch and had cut corners everywhere they could. These were supposed to be “temporary”. Why spend the cash to make them nice?

Morganville was really the first time that residents of Los Alamos had experienced a serious decline in the quality of housing. Suddenly the Sundt Apartments looked rather posh. And yet rents in Los Alamos were not determined by what housing unit you were assigned. They were determined by your salary.

The Sundts had their issues, but they were actually solidly build dwellings.

Kay Mark, wife of physicist Carson Mark, was said to have called the system of housing and rents in Los Alamos a “curious experiment in socialism: To each according to his need; from each according to his salary.”

Anyone who earned less than $2600 per year paid $17/mo in rent. While it’s difficult to imagine living on $2600 per year, that was a respectable salary in 1944. It’s equally impossible to imagine paying $17/mo in rent! But if you were one of the highest paid scientists at that time you might have been paying $67/mo in rent. Would you be irritated if you were a scientist paying three times the amount of rent for your cramped, poorly constructed and cheaply built Morganville house when a regular day laborer was paying $17/mo for a much nicer place in a prettier neighborhood?

It’s such an interesting system. And if you truly appreciate the evolution of the housing market here in Los Alamos, take a moment to see just how far things have come in some areas, and how they haven’t changed at all in others. It simply doesn’t do any justice to the history of housing in Los Alamos not to consider the way it all began. There is nowhere else like it and whether you fully understand it or not, moving to Los Alamos makes YOU a part of this amazing history!

View of Rio Grande and a home above taken from a spot near Hell Hole in White Rock.

The good news is that the Morganville houses are no longer part of the housing pool here in Los Alamos. And while we’re not paying $17 or even $67 per month for housing, the home prices are certainly beginning to stabilize in response to national trends in interest rates and home buying. So when you’re ready to talk housing here in Los Alamos, please give me a call! I’m your hometown Los Alamos Real Estate Broker, and I’d love to chat with you!

Month: July 2022

Welcome Home to Hanfordville!

Trailer Living in Los Alamos

The First Single Family House in Los Alamos

A Word About Los Alamos & Rent

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